1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to network technology. More particularly, the present invention relates to sharing content on a network, e.g., a home network.
2. Description of the Related Art
As home networks become more and more popular and the use of broadband connections becomes commonplace, people are looking for easy ways share content, e.g., with remote Internet users. As used herein, a “home network” refers to any private network, including but not limited to a private network controlled by an individual, a family, a business, a public entity, etc. However, the paradigm case of a home network is literally a network in a home.
The amount of digital content to be shared by the home network may be in the terabytes, when taking into account photos, music, documents, videos, data from Internet cameras, etc. The current solution is to post all content that the consumer wants to share on to public site web servers, such as www.geocities.com, www.msn.com, etc. However, there are several drawbacks to this solution. The space available is limited and extra storage space is costly. Advanced features (such as authentication) are also costly. Not all consumers want to post all of their content in a public place. Moreover, users may find it burdensome to transfer their content to public web servers. Moreover, users may find it burdensome to transfer their content to public web servers.
One possible way to allow the content to remain in the home, secure, and still allow Internet users to access it, would be for the consumer to host his own web server, e.g., on a personal computer (“PC”) in his or her home. However, this solution would have at least the following requirements: (1) a dedicated PC running web server software; (2) an Internet gateway that supports network address translation (“NAT”) and a firewall, and (3) the expertise to install and configure this equipment and servers.
All of these requirements are potentially problematic for a typical user. The last requirement is beyond the expertise of the vast majority of consumers.
Although the gateway provides the ability for multiple devices/PCs to gain access to the Internet, the devices/PCs are hidden in the home network from the Internet. If a consumer wants to share content from a PC/device behind the gateway to remote Internet users, the tasks of configuring the gateway properly to do port forwarding through NAT, which deals with mapping a selected port or protocol to a particular PC/device, and configuring the firewall to allow access to this PC on the home network, would be quite daunting for the casual consumer. The consumer would also need to install and configure the necessary servers on the PC/device to share the appropriate content.
The content would need to reside on a dedicated web server device and this device would need to remain on at all times. In order to secure the content on the web server, the web server would need to use authentication, which the consumer would need to configure with usernames and passwords. However, this database of usernames and passwords is usually only for a single device. It is not a common database used by all devices/PCs in the home network.
It would be desirable to provide content sharing capabilities for a home network without requiring consumers to be the IT department for the home network, the system administrator for servers running on the PC(s) in the home network and the web page designer in charge of displaying the content in a orderly fashion.